Characters
repeatedly ask, "Who is Mama?" In
case we're unclear about the titular figure in Mama, the screenplay helpfully explains to us three times exactly
who she is. Of course, the
explanations barely matter, given that any kind of suspense or mystery
surrounding the supernatural character is undermined once the movie shows us
what Mama is at the end of the prologue. The
pieces of information that follow are just the mechanics.

That
prologue is the most chilling part of Mama,
though for reasons the remainder of the movie bypasses. Setting itself up as a warped fairy tale with an opening title card that
scrawls out "Once upon a time," the opening details a regular man who,
after the most recent financial crisis, kills some of his co-workers, returns
home to murder his wife, and takes his two young daughters in his escape. After a car crash, the trio ends up at a cabin in the woods, where they
take shelter. Eventually, the father
decides what he believes he must do, but before he can kill his elder daughter,
two ghastly, brown arms wrap themselves around his face and pull him into the
darkness of the room. The figure
attached to the arms approaches the children in a subjective camera shot; from
that and the montage of a child's drawings over the credits, we gather that the
presence watches over the girls.

This is
Mama. Characters can pose questions
about it; director Andrés Muschietti can provide reveal after anticlimactic
reveal of it. Nothing changes in our
perception of the ghostly personage, except perhaps in our unwillingness to go
along with Muschietti and fellow screenwriters Barbara Muschietti (the
director's sister) and Neil Cross' attempts to sympathize with Mama after the
character's history has been revealed (again, three times). Mama is a force of raw but warped maternal instinct, willing and able to
dispense supernatural punishment to anyone whom it perceives getting in the way
of its self-appointed duties.

Those
are challenged five years later when the efforts of the girl's uncle Lucas (Nikolaj
Coster-Waldau) to find them succeed. Victoria
(Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) have survived in the cabin on
a diet that has left them emaciated (and digital). They have become feral, crawling on all fours and becoming defensive when
approached by others.

Dr.
Dreyfus (Daniel Kash), the girls' psychiatrist, begins his strange fascination
with Mama almost immediately. Despite
the countless other aspects of their psychological state, for some reason the
good doctor's testimony at a custody hearing to determine if Lucas and his
live-in girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain) will have guardianship over the
girls focuses almost exclusively on the figure he assumes they invented in their
minds. Exposition must be inserted
somewhere—no matter how awkwardly.

Victoria
and Lilly stay with Lucas and Annabel in a house provided by Dreyfus' institute.
The couple will raise the girls; the doctor will study them.

To no
one's surprise, Mama has followed them to the house. The movie offers plenty of scenes in which the ghost's presence is
revealed to little effect besides establishing what we already know—that Mama
has followed them to the house. Lilly
plays tug-of-war with a blanket in her room, and the static shot looking from
the hallways shows Victoria appearing somewhere else. Clearly, it's Mama in the
room. Annabel
puts away laundry in the girls' room as a form covered by a blanket that she
assumes is Lilly sits in the corner, and Muschietti cuts to the kitchen where
Victoria announces that Lilly is with her. Clearly,
it's Mama in the room. The process
repeats itself, with Mama materializing and disappearing at the will of the
screenplay's attempts to gin up nonexistent tension.

Save
for one instance before the climax in which Mama tries to dispatch a character,
the screenplay runs around in circles while Dreyfus starts an investigation into
whoever Mama might be or might have been. He
encounters that most contrived device: a character—in this instance, a public
records employee (Diane Gordon)—who has all the vital information conveniently
at her disposal, even if that means she searches for a living person in records
that over a century old and has a pretty well-thought-out theory about ghosts
despite saying that she isn't a religious person. She explains the story to Dreyfus twice, and Annabel has a first-person
dream of that sad tale (It turns out to be a dream within dream, just in case
the other shock effects aren't cheap enough).

Once
everyone is finally on the same page, they can start doing the requisite
questionable things, like wandering off alone to the cabin in the woods just in
time for night to fall when they arrive. The
most questionable part of Mama,
though, comes with its climax, as Muschietti tries to elicit pathos from a
twisted digital creation and a final act offers a misguided, inexplicable, and
perverse sort of sacrifice.